This image isn’t of an abaya, but of some of the many care products for them and is posted for fun since I went through so much trouble to get it in the supermarket. The woman who designed my abayas recommended Johnson’s Baby Shampoo or something like that, which I’ll have to find and then invest in (big time, if I keep buying abayas like I have been!).

This picture, though, might give a hint as to why grocery shopping is so time-consuming here. You’ll find some labels in English as are shown here, but most everything is in Arabic, which is totally incomprehensible to me, sometimes with a translation in fine print as to what it is in English. It is just overwhelming to be confronted with entire aisles of Arabic and have to go through the products trying to decipher what it is and if it’s what I want. I must have spent an hour trying to figure out what product would work to clean bathtubs. I’m not sure I ever did, but I’ll find out tomorrow when the house cleaning man shows up.

Other things that one might be used to at home are just hard to find, like I still can’t find a small sponge mop that the housekeeper wants. Dog food doesn’t seem to exist anywhere because they don’t like dogs here, so Sahraa is eating chicken breasts at the moment (no complaints from her as she got used to that in Budapest, where she had her own “personal” chef who doted on her). Heavy cream is tough to locate, and Parmesan cheese even harder. When my husband went shopping after we first arrived, he bought cream for a pasta recipe he wanted to make that night, except it turned out to be a yogurt drink. That is a dinner I’ll never forget!

Finished work well after 11 p.m. tonight and dinner after midnight, so will once again have to catch up tomorrow!